On the face of it, Modern Management Methods documents the preservation practices of two Le Corbusier projects. But that's just the half of it.

What better tool to put the lie to architecture’s aura of implacable rationality and precision? In Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City), writer-editor Caitlin Blanchfield and architect Farzin Lotfi-Jam point to the irony in Modernist architects’ embrace of the X ray as a totem of technological civilization, whose intrinsic qualities they imputed to their own work. Following Beatriz Colomina’s studies on the same subject, Blanchfield and Lotfi-Jam examine the UNESCO-protected corpus of Le Corbusier through two preservation projects, those of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, Germany, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Their aim is not to legitimate the canon, of course, but to reveal the “arbitrary arbitration of historical value and historical reconstruction” concomitant to all acts of preservation. 

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